Hitler's Car Park

While in Berlin, Sarah and I took a free walking tour. The tour guide stopped at a car park. About 8 meters below us, Adolph Hitler shot himself 65 years ago.

And right after his guards found his body in the bunker, they all lit up a cigarette. Apparently, Hitler hated the smell of smoke, so all the soldiers were prevented from smoking in his presence. But with him dead, and the war going as badly as it was, a cigarette must've seemed like a pretty good idea.

Berlin's a weird place. There's no way to reconcile its oppressive, fascist past with its fun, vibrant present. It gets even weirder when you layer in a second oppressive regime on top of it, so walking around you can't help but bump into the austere concrete slabs of the holocaust memorial, a fake military checkpoint with fake US and East German soldiers posing for photos, and the most delicious and cheapest pastries and roasted bratwurst imaginable. The experience is like watching TVs that are playing "Schindler's List," "Spy vs. Spy," and "Top Chef" all at once.

The death and hardship that happened in Berlin is intense and omnipresent. At the same time, they take their giant steins of beer and groaning plates of glorious greasy food just as seriously. The pain and the present are deadlocked, so they're allowed to coexist.

Which brings us back to the bunker, perhaps the one place where Germany doesn't display its past in all of its terror as prominently as it could. There's very little marking the bunker (our tour guide pointed out the "crappy little sign") and even that was only installed in 2006 before the World Cup. Before then the German government was afraid the bunker could become a Neo-Nazi pilgrimage.

When something as terrible as the Holocaust happens and someone as terrible as Hitler exists, I'm not sure there's ever a way to digest that trauma fully. You remember and move on the best you can. Maybe Berlin shows us how schizophrenic recovery can be. You can find the thickest, richest hot chocolate at a bar called Billy Wilder's, but it'll still be 900 meters from where Hitler killed himself. How can you reconcile something so good and so terrible?

When dealing with pain, it's of the utmost importance to find a place to house it. We have grave sites so we can locate the dead instead of having them follow us everywhere. Berlin does this too. The Jewish Museum is an ingeniously designed twisting lightning bolt of a building that shows two thousands years of German-Jewish history. One section is a stark concrete tower with a draft and a crack of light peeking through the top. The value in such a building isn't just to commemorate the experience, but to be able to stop commemorating. Instead of a feeling that you live with forever, the tower gives you a place that you can enter and also leave. It locates the pain so you can have a life and enjoy a beautiful city. You can move on.

And there's a lot to love in Berlin. The Reichstag is an impressive architectural feat with a walkway-lined glass dome that looks down into parliamentary proceedings. The intended effect for the politicians below is that whenever they look up they see their people above them and know they answer to them.

There's a bombed out church, which is erie to look at, but next to it is a beautiful new church, with walls made of translucent blue tiles that shine at night. Inside the new church was a basket that sold apples on the honor system for 1 euro apiece. For some reason I think that was the sweetest thing I ever saw.

Plus, everywhere you go there's cheap, delicious food and drink in quantities that are barely safe for human consumption. For dinner one night I had a German-style sauerkraut and bacon pizza. Another night we went to Henne which only serves fried halves of chicken, but they're so good it's worth the burn as you pick off hot pieces of meat with your fingers. Another night we went to a bar recommended by one of Sarah's friends and ordered pints of mead served in bull horns. (Of course. How else would you serve mead?) The mead was sweet, the horns were (presumably) clean, and, sitting at a foosball table with a board over it and soaking in the secondhand smoke of two dozen Germans watching soccer, it felt an awful lot like an adventure.

I think this is the best we can do. After the worst tragedies, life still continues so we might as well continue with it. Churches get rebuilt, parliaments remodeled, and bunkers get paved over to form car parks.

It feels right that the only commemoration of an evil man is a simple parking lot. It's a place to stand around, smoke a cigarette, and think, "Thank God that's over."